Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda (1928–2019) was a French filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist who worked across fiction, documentary, and installation over more than six decades. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, and raised in Sète on the French Mediterranean coast, she studied art history at the École du Louvre and photography before becoming the official photographer of Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire from 1951 to 1961. Without formal film training, she made her first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1955 — shot on location in Sète with non-professional actors and edited by Alain Resnais — a work that film historians have identified as a precursor to the French New Wave.
The films that followed move between fiction and documentary without settling into either. Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) follows a singer through two real-time hours of Paris; Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) reconstructs the death of a young woman through a chain of testimonies. Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), shot on digital video, marked a shift toward a personal, digressive essay form in which Varda appears on screen alongside her subjects. From 2003, she developed a parallel practice as a visual artist, producing installations that combine film stock, photography, video, and found objects — including structures built from the 35mm prints of her own films, which she reconstructed as cabins and triptychs. Her final film, Varda by Agnès, was completed in 2019.
Her first exhibition as a visual artist, Patatutopia, was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2003; subsequent solo shows included L'Île et Elle at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris (2006), Agnès Varda in Californialand at LACMA (2013), and Varda/Cuba at the Centre Pompidou (2016). Her work is held by the Fondation Cartier, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Pompidou, among others. She received the Golden Lion at Venice for Vagabond in 1985, an honorary Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2015, and in 2017 became the first woman to receive an honorary Academy Award.
